There is an inherent redundancy in message traffic on the internet, that generates an excessive load on the backbone network. The caching of certain applications and the provision of web proxies on the internet, eases some of the unnecessary replication in data transfer. The practice of multicasting is another technique to improve the efficiency of distribution. In multicasting, a sender distributes the same document, data, or message to a large number of receivers who are usually dispersed over a wide area.
To improve efficiency, it is beneficial to adopt a scheme in which a copy of the multicast document is delivered in each region to a predetermined server with the local distribution delegated to the server. This replicated cache mechanism may need an efficient tree building algorithm. Several examples of this are already used in internet protocols for static distributions of replica caches.
There are significant problems that are not solved by existing practices in the replication of caches on the internet. The main problem is the dynamic nature of internet traffic, both over time and location. There are locations which are active at certain times of the day and at other times they are inactive. What is needed is a dynamic technique for assigning and reassigning servers in the network that will perform the role of replicated caches.